


building nothing, laying bricks

by singingtomysoul



Series: paint the black hole blacker [2]
Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Episode Related, Gen, Hazing, Reference to sexual assault, reference to disordered eating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-03
Updated: 2016-02-03
Packaged: 2018-05-17 22:44:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5888143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singingtomysoul/pseuds/singingtomysoul
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'The Gang Group Dates' reaction fic. </p><p>Dennis has been rated his whole life. But he's learned how to play the game.</p>
            </blockquote>





	building nothing, laying bricks

Dennis always wants to go watch the shows, but his dad says he has to stay home. Boys don’t go to these things, that’d make them fruits or perverts, Frank says. Dennis is too young to be a pervert, and like hell he’s gonna grow up to be a fruit.

His sister comes home with the tulle of her skirt crumpled, torn a little on one side. She’s rubbing her eyes with tight balled-up fists, sniffling over their mom’s tirade.

“A six! We worked that routine until it was at least an eight, but what do you expect when their moms are all blowing the judg - don’t you walk away from me, Deandra - ”

Dee runs up to their room, cheeks wet with her tears. Barbara calls after her: “You’d have managed a point or two more if you hadn’t tripped like some moronic stork!”

Dennis knows that routine back to front. He helped her practice it until she was exhausted, wobbling on her feet. He wouldn’t have tripped. He’d have been a perfect ten.

—

The boys swipe the list and pass it around the locker room. Half these girls probably don’t even know the boys they’re ranking - there’s a few he’d never even smiled at, forget holding their hands. Or kissing them. He still wants to know; they all grab for the only copy.

He’s still thinking about it hours later. Only mid-rank doesn’t make sense. He’s read all the dumb Tiger Beats, for research. He knows what girls look at and pin up on their walls. He makes sure Frank buys him the wardrobe. It’s the right salon styling his hair.

His dad rolls his eyes. “If the girls know every name on that list, then they’re all sluts. Go bang a few, do a good job, word’ll get around. You’ll inch up a name or three.”

“Why even worry?” his mother drawls. “They’re a pack of little savages, don’t know what’s good for them. You’ll be the most popular boy in school in a year or two.”

(“Deandra, I’d put that down, your face has started to fill out a little. The minute you’re the fat girl, it’s something you never get rid of-”)

He’s twelve years old.

—

They keep putting the frat pledges in a line. They switch around one, then two, like some carnie with a shell game at a boardwalk until they’re all mixed up again. Picking out a random one: “recite the chant we taught you,” they say, and they make him say it louder and louder until his face is red. To another: “Here’s a special task just for you. If you’re game, maybe we’ll move you up a little in the running.” They hand him a bra.

This is nothing, Dennis knows, these are the playful jokes before the real fuckery begins. But he still feels the rage bubbling up. They should be begging him.

One night he teabags their vice president. Just straight-up dips his sack in ink and trails it over the dude’s lips, bumps it against the tip of his nose like a fucking paintbrush. In the morning he feigns innocence, all stoic and unmoving, while a sputtering wreck of a college senior points his finger through the lineup. The veep’s anger meets a few terrible poker faces, which gets him on a power trip, and suddenly the pledge numbers are whittled down by half.

Dennis is learning how to play this game.

He writes home every week, telling his mother about the worship he finds with his new friends. Dee drops out, lands in a place for crazy people, and it’s all the better for him.

Dennis gets through college by the skin of his teeth, barely managing a communications major when he’s through. But he has all his books. He has the speeches he’d videotaped himself for extra credit. And he has it all down to a science now. Looking good is really just a series of steps.

And if you don’t know how to make it work, you can always make some poor bastard look worse.

—

Dennis counts crow’s feet and calories. Dennis memorizes catalogs, and human neuroses, and visual cues. Dennis starts keeping files on people he knows, and numbers on the women he doesn’t. He videotapes his speeches. He videotapes his sex.

His world narrows to five people. It had felt incomplete with four. Five feels solid. It’s the amount of points in a star. Four people can stand as equal points on a star, but the fifth always crowns it. Always perches on top.

—

The plastic feels cool under his hands. No one has VHS anymore, but there’s a certain charm. The way it wears down under repeat viewings, the way you can see it spooled up tight in its little dark case.

There’s a long line of ones. Not as many as twos - he was magnanimous. Fair. Most women rank a three; he’s a purist, average should mean average.

He is not average. He’s certainly not -

He’s fought too hard to maintain -

He tears open the top, fingers fumbling. It’s like cracking open bone. He tears out the ribbon, watching it unspool in long coils of dense, shiny black. When he’s ripped the casing bare he grabs for another, barely looking at it.

Why are there so many? Boxes of them, weighing him down. Sub par quantity, burying him in rivers of black, tainting him with it. He’ll crack himself open. Unspool the waste. Maybe there’ll only be a little left in the end, but it’ll be the pieces that count. He’ll rebuild.

“Holy shit,” Dennis hears from the doorway, and he tunes her out. Fixed on his task, he doesn’t look up. He hears incredulous giggles and footsteps down the hallway, the slamming of a door.

Dennis is thirty-nine. He pulls out another ream of tape, and feels something in him stretch too thin.

He can handle this, he thinks. He just has to relearn the rules. He’s done it before.

It’s all in the documentation.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the song 'Caring is Creepy' by The Shins.


End file.
